“If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.”

— Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, book Oration on the Dignity of Man

8. 40-42; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola7

humanist and philosopher from Italy 1463–1494

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola7

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